Across all of Europe, Andalucía was the region with the highest unemployment last year, calculated at 30.4% of the workforce. Europe includes some pretty strange places, by the way (Romania had 7.7% in the 4th quarter of 2011, for example). 30.4% across Andalucía, and even more in Almería. Wonderful stuff: great politics. How do I vote?
There is, of course, more. Of the ten regions with the highest unemployment in 2011, eight of them are in Spain. After Andalucía, we have:
The Canaries (29.7%), the French Island of Reunión (29.6 %) (It's somewhere to the east of Madagascar), Ceuta, the Spanish possession in Morocco (29.3%), Murcia (25.4%), Extremadura (25.1%), Valencia (24.5%), the other Spanish enclave in North Africa: Melilla (24.4%), a Greek region called Dytiki Makedonia (23.2%) and, rounding off the ten, we return to Spain with Castilla-La Mancha (22.9%).
While the new austerity and higher taxes and prices may make our unemployment even higher in the second half of 2012, Spain's protection of its (remaining) employees, following a system introduced by Franco, is legendary.
You can't fire 'em so you don't hire 'em.